Look, I come on Symthic for the first time in ages, and complete idiocy is posted.

Can we stop pretending that BF3 was a bad game? You had two tries to make a game fun to play while having all guns have a role. This resulted in BF4 having duplicates (or, in some cases, triplicates) of the same stats page, with, sometimes, a different sound or model. I know you can't quantify fun and mathematical discrepancies are more fun to exterminate than making a game fun, but at least try.

Balancing a game around one weapon works before people like practicing with one weapon that is good at most, if not all engagement ranges. People like improving themselves instead of having the game give them handicaps. Perhaps you don't, most people do. Hence CSGO.
Disregard the fact that CSGO is filled with scrubs who don't realise that the SG is better than the AK at most engagements.
Disregard the fact that CSGO's weapon balance is, at the moment, completely and utterly convoluted by the imbalance of pistols and the UMP.

Making Vertical recoil random would only make the only reliable balancing element (based on which, people can actually get better) unreliable. Used to how much you have to pull down when shooting six bullets? Just pull down randomly, hell, even shake your mouse around. You might have a chance to hit your target. It would probably also make people gravitate even more to Medic and Scout weapons, as with those, bullets actually go where you're aiming them. Magical thought, I know.

Of course CQC-snipers stay an issue if you handle them as one, give them the same movement speed as normal weapons and give them great quickscoping accuracy, after which, pulling out a pistol, from which one bullet is enough to take down your enemy (provided the fact that you hit the sniper bullet) is laughably quick.

Shooting in video games has NEVER felt authentic at all. Neither does getting shot in video games. It's a pointless design objective because the majority games are fun precisely because they aren't a direct simulation of reality.

I am ok with design choices that aren't aunthentic, but am really not a fan of things that are counter-intuitive like this negative spread rubbish.

I propose a new metric should be proposed when judging game design things. The very first thing you should ask yourself is: Will this make the game more fun? If the answer is not unambiguously yes. Discussion ends.

A big part of what makes games fun is that you get positive feedback for your actions. Having guns bouncing all over randomly isn't fun because you're sort of just hoping for RNG to bless you. Horizontal recoil is tolerable merely because it averages to either keep your gun dead center, or pulls slightly in a way you can control. Pulling all over the place randomly results in shaky cam as someone already pointed out.

I found the infantry learning curve in BF1 really unpleasant for a few reasons: one the negative spread thing really put me off support weapons at first, two really tight CBQ is all hipfire meta with specialized weapons, three weapons optimized around close range fighting are utterly garbage starting at distances that aren't really all that far (~ 20 m!!!!). Sets you up for an experience that is almost guaranteed to frustrate.

We don't need to heap on more RNG to further frustrate the experience.

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "tankmayvin" (May 15th 2017, 8:57pm)

I was going to quote people, but I quickly figured out that would be a rather large wall of text.

The idea behind this (and potentially similar elements like other-shot-multipliers and/or a small degree of downward recoil) is to transition away from relying on spread, to more reliance on recoil. See, from a mechanical perspective it doesn't really make a difference. With both random V-Recoil and random H-Recoil, spread becomes dramatically less nessessary to accomplish the same game design goals.

And here's where that's important: How the game feels and plays from the players' perspective. The designers' job is to create the desired gameplay outcome, however, if multiple routes can be taken to that outcome, the one that is more intuitive should always be used. Where possible, a game and its mechanics need to always be as intuitive as possible, and this is where most of the complaints about spread come from, especially with BF1. Arguing "it's not hard to deal with spread mechanics if you learn them" is missing the point entirely, because that's the exact opposite of intuitive. Spread is really never intuitive, for similar reasons we don't have proper feedback for Suppression right now. Again, most Suppression complaints come from its current lack of being intuitive and showing itself properly.

Players don't actually care that weapon range is limited and that the game is preventing them from hitting targets, they care when it feels artificial and unintuitive. Case in point is the Hellriegel. It's supposedly a high-recoil weapon, but even I, a no-aim-assist console player, have absolutely no trouble keeping its sights on target. But my tracers sure as hell fly in every direction. This is bad. This is exactly the kind of design that is unintuitive and feels like the game limiting you, rather than the gun limiting you. And that's important, because spread vs recoil has absolutely nothing to do with stats and numbers. Used properly, they accomplish the exact same design purposes.

Randomizing V-Recoil is the missing piece in the puzzle that would allow shifting to more recoil and less spread. MGs shouldn't have a reverse spread model, they should have a reverse recoil model. Guns (maybe) shouldn't have more spread while moving, they should have more recoil while moving. Obviously spread, spread increase, and similar still very much have a place, especially on single shot weapons like bolt actions, or for first shots in general, but spread can easily be traded for recoil, making the playerbase happier, while still accomplishing the same design goals.

I was going to quote people, but I quickly figured out that would be a rather large wall of text.

The idea behind this (and potentially similar elements like other-shot-multipliers and/or a small degree of downward recoil) is to transition away from relying on spread, to more reliance on recoil. See, from a mechanical perspective it doesn't really make a difference. With both random V-Recoil and random H-Recoil, spread becomes dramatically less nessessary to accomplish the same game design goals.

And here's where that's important: How the game feels and plays from the players' perspective. The designers' job is to create the desired gameplay outcome, however, if multiple routes can be taken to that outcome, the one that is more intuitive should always be used. Where possible, a game and its mechanics need to always be as intuitive as possible, and this is where most of the complaints about spread come from, especially with BF1. Arguing "it's not hard to deal with spread mechanics if you learn them" is missing the point entirely, because that's the exact opposite of intuitive. Spread is really never intuitive, for similar reasons we don't have proper feedback for Suppression right now. Again, most Suppression complaints come from its current lack of being intuitive and showing itself properly.

Players don't actually care that weapon range is limited and that the game is preventing them from hitting targets, they care when it feels artificial and unintuitive. Case in point is the Hellriegel. It's supposedly a high-recoil weapon, but even I, a no-aim-assist console player, have absolutely no trouble keeping its sights on target. But my tracers sure as hell fly in every direction. This is bad. This is exactly the kind of design that is unintuitive and feels like the game limiting you, rather than the gun limiting you. And that's important, because spread vs recoil has absolutely nothing to do with stats and numbers. Used properly, they accomplish the exact same design purposes.

Randomizing V-Recoil is the missing piece in the puzzle that would allow shifting to more recoil and less spread. MGs shouldn't have a reverse spread model, they should have a reverse recoil model. Guns (maybe) shouldn't have more spread while moving, they should have more recoil while moving. Obviously spread, spread increase, and similar still very much have a place, especially on single shot weapons like bolt actions, or for first shots in general, but spread can easily be traded for recoil, making the playerbase happier, while still accomplishing the same design goals.

This is really the best solution for every party.

Spread and recoil in combination actually make sense, at least until you get into this negative spread wind up non-sense.

When a gun fires the whole damn thing wobbles and the barrel whips, barrel whipping and even vibrating during the firing of a single bullet introduces something called disperson: ie the bullets land around the aim point. Bullets also naturally disperse from windage in-batch variation and all sorts of things. In battlefield we call this spread. Dispersion due to barrel deflection is a huge design issue on autocannons with cantilevered barrels and the like.

On top of dispersion, you get good old recoil of the bulk gun system against the shoot or firing platform.

The problem with random recoil is that it jerks the player's aim point all over the place - so while it visually represents what is going on better, it doesn't make that fact any more fun. Bullets spitting out all around your aimpoint isn't fun either. It's all bad, just for slightly different reasons. I'd like to see less spread and more recoil. The LMG mechanics frankly just make me sad/mad.

Spread and recoil in combination actually make sense, at least until you get into this negative spread wind up non-sense.

When a gun fires the whole damn thing wobbles and the barrel whips, barrel whipping and even vibrating during the firing of a single bullet introduces something called disperson: ie the bullets land around the aim point. Bullets also naturally disperse from windage in-batch variation and all sorts of things. In battlefield we call this spread. Dispersion due to barrel deflection is a huge design issue on autocannons with cantilevered barrels and the like.

On top of dispersion, you get good old recoil of the bulk gun system against the shoot or firing platform.

The problem with random recoil is that it jerks the player's aim point all over the place - so while it visually represents what is going on better, it doesn't make that fact any more fun. Bullets spitting out all around your aimpoint isn't fun either. It's all bad, just for slightly different reasons. I'd like to see less spread and more recoil. The LMG mechanics frankly just make me sad/mad.

Of course, I'm definitely not saying no spread at all. Base Spread is the weapon's inherent accuracy, some Spread Increase is needed for weapon inaccuracy built up over shots fired, and some degree of Moving Spread will always be required until we stop spawning bullets from the camera and actually start spawning them in the gun model.

MGs are actually a great example, because as much as their negative spread works well mechanically, it's entirely non-intuitive. It really doesn't explain itself to the player in any way, you basically have to read a tooltip or ask online, which is a stellar example of something being unintuitive and/or poorly communicated to players. If we instead applied the same mechanic to recoil, players would have all figured it out in their first couple lives.

People tried to tap/burst fire their MGs for ages, confused as to what the hell was wrong with them, but if it had been recoil instead, it would have been immediately obvious that the best ways to use them are single shots or sustained fire. When your gun kicks a lot at first, then settles down, you're not going to try to tap/burst fire it, you simply won't do it on an instinctive level. If your Automatico kicked all over the place, you're far less likely to want to magdump it. Recoil is intuitive and needs no explaining, while accomplishing the same design goals.

Who Enjoys, Wins

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "BleedingUranium" (May 16th 2017, 1:29am) with the following reason: spelling

You mean watching the tracers and/or hipfire crosshair isn't enough to show what's happening? Because it's visually very obvious.

It is not, as should be fairly apparent by now. As spread and recoil (with random V-Recoil) accomplish the same design goals, the question is purely about feel and gameplay feedback from a player perspective. Whether something is intuitive and whether something is simple/easy to understand are two entirely separate ideas.

Spread mechanics are not difficult to understand, but they are also not intuitive. Really, recoil vs spread is not a gameplay/mechanic discussion, it's an art/player-feedback sort of discussion, and in that context the gameplay people should simply be doing whatever the player-perspective people say is best. This is a good example of how BF1 is fantastically designed from a mechanical perspective, but that doesn't always translate to being good from the player-side perspective. And ultimately every game has to be good from the players' perspective.

If you sit someone down who hasn't played BF1 and tell them to use an MG, they will inevitably be confused for quite a while as to how the heck its shooting mechanics work. If you were to swap those mechanics from spread to recoil, they would figure them out over the course of a couple lives, if that long. This isn't just theorycrafting, this is was a very true reality for the first month or more of BF1's life.

it's entirely non-intuitive. It really doesn't explain itself to the player in any way,

You mean watching the tracers and/or hipfire crosshair isn't enough to show what's happening? Because it's visually very obvious.

No matter how obvious it is, it's really not intuitive. It goes against all reasonable expectation that the more I shoot at something the magically more accurate my weapon becomes. It's literally something straight out of Borderlands.

IMO it's a piss poor mechanic to convey the concept that LMGs are heavier and more cumbersome than rifles and the like.

I don't really want random v-recoil either. Spread works well enough to a certain degree, yet there's still hilariously bad examples of the gun not providing enough feedback to the player that his spread is going insane. Case in point, the CQB SLRs being fired at near maximum RPM at a target 30m, with the person training the sights directly on a target, but only the first shot hits. I don't think random v-recoil is the answer, I feel like it would just turn into one more random and obnoxious deviation the person has to account for.

I'm also glad I wasn't the only one who thought the reverse spread model is counter intuitive for LMGs. Why didn't we simply go back to the BF3/Hardline treatment, which was inverse recoil model through high (Hardline had INSANE) first shot recoil? What about the other factors that made them different enough from ARs like significantly worse hipfire? Did DICE and the others not think that was enough to separate them from SMGs, and to prevent them from being ARs?